This was not how Vanuvio felt when he was in school. He even skipped some.

“I was very smart on that, but not on doing the math.”

At the school’s open house on Aug. 22, Gunn said, 52 fathers signed a pledge to bring their children to school and volunteer during the year. She was pleased to see more than that in the halls on the first day.

Gunn said teachers had not seen so many people at the school’s open house in 10 or 12 years. Teachers told Gunn the difference was contacting families through an Internet service for teachers to communicate with families and each other, called ConnectEd, to invite them.

Twenty five minutes after the class bell, the halls were empty.

“Not too bad for the first day,” Gunn said. “8:15 and it’s all quiet.”

IN WESTERN MIDDLE SCHOOL at 11 a.m. Patrick Vernon was taking his social studies class through the paperwork of the first day of middle school.

“This will not be the most exciting class,” Vernon told his students, but said class would be more interesting in future days.

First he rearranged their seats in alphabetical order so he could learn their names and then took them through the notebooks where they will bring forms home to their parents.

One of the first papers he pulled out was a letter from state Superintendent of Public Schools June Atkinson telling parents there were four students killed getting on and off school buses last school year. So they should warn students not to assume everyone on the road is paying attention.

There was a sheaf of other papers going home, medical forms, emergency contacts, “the more phone numbers the better,” Vernon said.

Then it was the paperwork for the students themselves like lunch calendars, chicken nuggets and bread sticks Monday, and class rules. “What is noncompliance?” a student asked.

Vernon had not told them false, before the lunch bell, there were chins on fists.

As it got close to time to line up for lunch, Vernon sized up middle school while explaining how sixth-graders taking seventh-grade math would eat lunch with other sixth graders, but not the others in his class.